Picture Pages, Picture Pages, Time to Get Your Picture Pages at 3:31 PM

I haven’t posted here for a while, but I’ve had a few on the other blogs, so at least that’s something. We did some landscaping on Saturday. I will say this: if you want to do something that’s harder than it looks, remove a large patch of grass from your lawn. That’s what we did. I’ll be traveling next week, so for Jessica’s Mother’s Day present, we went and got some flowers (marigolds and some phlox) and planted them around the mailbox. The planting itself wasn’t so bad. The tough part was the aforementioned grass. I was picturing taking it up the same way sod goes down. I figured I’d get a shovel under there, start a patch going, and just roll it right up. That is not how it went. I talked a while ago about how much it sucked to pull up ivy. This was way worse, because at least with ivy you can pull for more than half a second before something breaks. With the grass, it just came up in patches. So it took about two hours to get everything ripped up, then we tilled it and planted. Here’s some pictures (these are mostly unedited, but I don't feel like editing them right now):


I forgot to take a "before" picture, but you can probably imagine it. Pretty much take away the border and the mulch and the flowers, and add...grass.

Also, while I'm at it, here's the before and after for the flowerbed in the back yard. I took the before pictures last fall, and the after's are from a couple of weeks ago.


Before,


...and after. The pictures aren't at exactly the same angle, so that's annoying, but whatever. We were happy that the tree in the middle survived, because we took it out completely and re-planted it. It doesn't look great in the picture, but it's filled out now.

And while I'm still at it, how about a couple of Luke?


This is what happens when I try to use a TV tray.

Here's a couple more recent ones (from when we were in Chicago):



Song of the Day: "I'd Rather Be Blind, Crippled and Crazy", by The Derek Trucks Band. These guys are good. Their sound (at least on their latest album) is a real funky blues type thing. This song is a great example of that.